I brought home too many plants from the horticultural students' sale a couple of weeks back. This happens to me. I do not buy much, as a rule — I prefer fewer and well-chosen things over a house full of ordinary ones — but plants are where the rule comes apart. The students had worked hard. The prices were good. I left with more than my garden could hold.
So they went to four other gardens.
My mother's first, on a rainy Sunday — the best kind of planting weather, because the sky does the watering for you. She is usually only herbs. This year she stretched: a tomato, a few hot peppers, fennel, and an eggplant I had to talk her into. The last one she tried was years ago at her cottage, in a summer that never warmed up, and it gave her a single eggplant the size of an... egg. She decided to give it another go.
Two friends took what they were short on, or curious to try.
The fourth was a neighbor. I had offered her some of the extras; she offered back her plot at the community garden, and asked if I would come plant them with her. We did, one morning this week — an hour, start to finish: a quick weeding, the planting, the watering, a long stretch of talking somewhere in the middle of it. Her kohlrabi, which she puts in every year. A few herbs. A ground cherry in the corner, because they grow to the size of a small bush and a corner is the only place they can sprawl without swallowing everything else. In the gaps between, I seeded rapini, chard, and arugula — catch cropping, the trick of pulling a fast harvest out of the spaces before the slow plants need the room.
Angela and I met over our dogs. Hers was fourteen then. She has since died, and Angela has decided 75 is not the age to start over with a dog of her own — so she borrows one, a young family's, in the neighborhood, and walks him and trains him.
She has been studying Italian and is planning a trip to Italy this fall. In the meantime she sets the self-checkout at the hardware store to Italian. One afternoon a cashier heard the machine speaking it across the aisle and rushed over to rescue her, reaching to switch it back. Angela had to explain: the Italian was deliberate — immersion, by way of a hardware store checkout.
Her trip got me thinking about Italy, and about how the Italian way of living suddenly has a name. What is now trending as nonnamaxxing is named for the nonna, the Italian grandmother — slow kitchens, long tables, food as a way of caring for people. Italy has done it for centuries without calling it anything but living. It is the way I have chosen to live for most of my adult life. And before that too, when I think about it. The hashtag is new. None of the rest of it is.
The air outside now smells of lilac and barbecue. When the wind blows, even inside.
I have to go to the nursery today for yellow pole bean seeds. This time, nothing else is coming home — no matter how hard that turns out to be.
— Catherine